In recent times, there have been rapid advancements in techniques for tracking (or monitoring) movements of vehicles such as cars, ships, aeroplanes, and so forth. Further, tracking the movements of vehicles is of critical importance for semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles to avoid operational errors and accidents.
Typically, inertial navigation systems include inertial measurement units for tracking the movements of vehicles. For example, the inertial measurement units include motion sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and so forth, to determine the movements of vehicles. However, simple and low-cost inertial measurement units suffer from a number of drawbacks such as offset errors (namely, offset errors while inertial measurement unit is subject to invariant conditions, and repeatability offset errors where the inertial measurement unit is subject to variant conditions between similar conditions), scale factor errors (namely, errors on first order sensitivity of the inertial measurement unit due to non-repeatability and non-linearity), misalignment errors (namely, errors due to imperfect mechanical mounting of the inertial measurement unit on vehicles), cross axis sensitivity (namely, errors due to parasitic measurement induced in the inertial measurement unit by solicitation along an axis orthogonal to axes of the motion sensors), noise (namely, errors during use of the inertial measurement unit within an environment), and environment sensitivity (namely, errors due to sensitivity of the inertial measurement unit to thermal gradients and/or wind/water currents within the environment).
Therefore, nowadays, high-performance inertial measurement units are being used in vehicles to overcome the drawbacks of the simple and low-cost inertial measurement units. However, the high-performance inertial measurement units also have certain limitations associated with use thereof. Examples of such limitations include, heavy weight of the high-performance inertial measurement units, high cost of the high-performance inertial measurement units, and so forth. For example, weight of a high performance inertial measurement unit may be approximately 1 kilogram. Specifically, the high-performance inertial measurement units consume a large amount of energy from the vehicles due to the heavy weight, and may also reduce payload weight capacity for vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles.
Therefore, in light of the foregoing discussion, there exists a need to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks associated with contemporary inertial navigation systems.